003 The Plan I Wanted No Part Of

Sebastian

I hadn't slept in eleven days, not really, not the kind of sleep that counts, and I was starting to think my body had simply given up asking.

Jane had woken twice the night before, both times from the same nightmare she wouldn't describe, and both times I'd sat on the edge of her bed until her breathing evened out, watching her small chest rise and fall and thinking about another small chest that used to do the same thing three years ago, until it stopped. I didn't sleep after that. I went down to my office instead and read quarterly reports I didn't absorb a single word of, because staring at numbers was easier than staring at the ceiling and thinking about my brother's face the last time I saw it, laughing about something stupid, completely unaware it was the last time.

Beatrix found me there at seven in the morning, which should have told me something was wrong immediately, because Beatrix didn't do mornings unless she wanted something.

"You look terrible," she said, by way of greeting, settling into the chair across from my desk like she owned it, which, technically, a portion of this building still belonged to her, so I supposed she did.

"It's been a rough two weeks."

"Yes. Well." She smoothed her skirt, a small precise gesture that meant she was building up to something. "Life continues, Sebastian. Someone has to keep it moving."

"Is there a reason you're in my office at seven."

"I want to talk to you about the girl."

I looked up from the report I wasn't reading. "What girl."

"Christabel. Gabriel's fiancée." Beatrix said the word fiancée the way other people said allergic reaction. "I met with her father yesterday, after the service. Lovely man. Terrible business sense. His shop is drowning, Sebastian, has been for over a year, and he's too proud to say so out loud, but I do my research."

"I'm sure you do."

"I've offered him a solution." She let that sit there for a moment, watching my face the way she always watched everything, like she was cataloguing it for later use. "The company will absorb the debt. Quietly. No press, no scandal, no humiliation for a man who's already lost enough dignity this year."

"That's generous of you." I didn't trust generousness coming from Beatrix any more than I trusted a snake that had suddenly decided to lie still.

"It comes with a condition."

There it was.

"Christabel marries into this family," she said. "She marries you."

I actually laughed, a short, humorless bark of a sound that surprised even me. "No."

"Sebastian."

"I said no. I don't know what kind of fantasy you've built in your head, Beatrix, but I am not marrying a woman I have never spoken to because you feel sentimental about my dead brother's fiancée."

"Sentimental." Her mouth twisted like the word tasted bad. "I am being practical. That girl is alone, her family is drowning, and this family owes her something after what happened to the man she was supposed to marry in three weeks. And you." Her eyes went cold and precise, the way they always did right before she said something designed to land exactly where it hurt. "You need a mother for that child of yours who isn't a revolving door of women your assistant vets for gold-digging tendencies."

"Jane has a mother." My voice came out lower than I meant it to, sharper. "She's just not here to raise her."

Something flickered across Beatrix's face, there and gone too fast to name. "I'm aware."

"Are you." I stood up, because sitting suddenly felt unbearable, the whole conversation pressing down on my chest like something physical. "You know what I think, Beatrix. I think you've never once, in the thirty years you've been in this family, done a single thing that wasn't about what you could get out of it. So forgive me if I don't believe this is about Christabel's shop, or my daughter, or even Gabriel. What do you actually want."

She stood too, unhurried, gathering her bag from the floor with the same deliberate calm she'd walked in with, and for a moment I thought she wasn't going to answer at all.

"I want this family to survive its own grief," she said, "instead of letting it tear us apart the way it's already starting to. And I want a granddaughter who speaks again before she turns five, Sebastian, because I have buried enough silence in this family for one lifetime."

That one landed. She knew it would.

"The offer stands until Friday," she said, moving toward the door. "After that, I make the same offer to her father without the marriage attached, and he takes a very public bankruptcy, and everyone in his small corner of Paris gets to watch it happen in real time. Your choice how kind we are about it."

"That's not a choice. That's blackmail."

"It's family," Beatrix said, and there was something almost like tenderness in the way she said it, which was somehow worse than if she'd been cold. "We've always called it that. It's just never sounded pretty when someone says it out loud."

She left, and I stood there in my office with the door closed and the sun barely up over the skyline, and I thought about a girl I had seen for exactly four seconds at a funeral, laughing at something her friend whispered, the only real laugh in that entire cathedral full of performed grief, and I thought, absolutely not, I will find another way.

My phone buzzed on the desk. My assistant, a message flagged urgent, the kind she only sent when something had already gone wrong instead of about to.

Sir. Christabel Chen's father just called the front desk. He wants to know when he can bring his daughter in to discuss the arrangement.